The One Laptop per
Child (OLPC) project
has provided one
thing of value to international
development:
a handy litmus
test for whether
someone should be
taken seriously. As
Peter Diamandis and
Steven Kotler, authors
of Abundance,
praise OLPC, despite a complete lack of evidence
of positive impact, it is quickly obvious
what to expect from the book.

Abundance is techno-utopianism at its
worst. The outlook of the book can be
summed up by a discussion of the advent of
3-D printers—machines that can
form three-dimensional objects
much as an inkjet printer forms
words. Soon, the authors suggest,
“everyone” will have one of these
amazing machines. They approvingly
quote an innovator of 3-D
printing technology: “And once
that happens it will change everything.
… Instead of placing an order
and waiting 24 hours for your
FedEx package, just hit print and
get it in minutes.” Although you
may be wondering how solving a
1 percent problem will change the
world of the billions of people
without easy access to electricity,
clearly the authors aren’t.

Why? Because no matter what
the symptom, the authors see a
technological Band-Aid. They describe a future
in which something like Google is directly
connected to our brains so that when we
think of something we don’t know, the answers
are instantly supplied to us. Clearly
this technology innovation is not working
yet, as the authors didn’t automagically learn
that they have devastatingly mistaken symptoms
for problems. In the few places where
they begin to acknowledge that the problems
that keep much of the world disenfranchised,
impoverished, and unhealthy are not technological
in origin, they quickly explain that we
already “know” how to deal with those
issues. For instance, we “know” that “community
support is the most critical component
for any water solution” and “maintenance
workers need to be incentivized.” Now
that we know these facts, a technology breakthrough
is all that’s needed to fix global water
problems. I wonder what technology will fi x
global justice problems now that we know all
people are created equal.

Abundance is meant to be an optimistic
antidote to the world’s doomsayers, but it
left me deeply depressed. If bright and innovative
minds are still completely captured by
technological fixes to social problems, we
have much further to go in solving those
problems than I believed.

After throwing Abundance across the
room, I found Philip Auerswald’s The Coming Prosperity a breath of fresh
air. Auerswald’s focus is on human
beings and the way they
solve problems. Technology
matters only insofar as it enables
the people solving their own
problems to outpace the people
creating them.

Auerswald’s term for people
who solve problems is a familiar
and dear one to readers of this
magazine: entrepreneur. His main
concern is that entrepreneurs, a
term he uses quite expansively,
are not receiving enough attention
from policymakers, economists,
political scientists, and philanthropists.
These groups all
come in for criticism for their
habits of patting entrepreneurs
on the head before getting back to the serious
business of picking winners and driving
policy from the top down.

Ultimately though, he argues, this habit is
irrelevant. The world’s entrepreneurs are
now numerous enough, free enough, and,
yes, have access to sufficient technology, to
innovate and succeed in spite of the powers
that be. Auerswald writes not to convince the
powerful and influential at the top of the pyramid
to change as much as to inform them
that they are no longer relevant—and that’s
good news for everyone.

This is a message that needs to be delivered.
Unfortunately, The Coming Prosperity
doesn’t do the best job of delivering it. The
book wavers between popular and academic
modes, between personal anecdote and
global sweep, between explaining the deficiencies of current elites and telling them
they don’t matter. As a result, chapters tend
to ramble and it’s easy to lose the plot. The
best way to read the book is probably to read
the last page of each chapter first. Then
you’ll be in a better position to appreciate
the many interesting anecdotes and data.

Despite its weaknesses in execution, Auerswald’s
fundamentally humble message is
both cheering and worth hearing. You and I
don’t have the answers to the world’s problems,
and we don’t need to. There are now
enough smart people in every corner of the
world with access to the ideas, tools, and resources
necessary to ensure the coming of a
new and truly global prosperity no matter
what the 1 percent or anyone else does. I’m
a skeptic by nature and by no means convinced
by Auerswald, but I’m more hopeful
than I was before picking up the book. Maybe
the failures of Abundance’s authors to appreciate
what it truly takes to solve problems
simply don’t matter after all.

Timothy Ogden is executive partner of Sona Partners, editor-in-chief of Philanthropy Action, and a regular blogger for the Stanford Social Innovation Review.